


Love's a Bond

by tucuxi



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, bondword
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 11:28:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5783668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tucuxi/pseuds/tucuxi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iruka was in the chuunin showers after a particularly messy B-rank mission when he first noticed the bondword on his left forearm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love's a Bond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taudi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taudi/gifts).



Iruka was in the chuunin showers after a particularly messy B-rank mission when he first noticed the bondword on his left forearm. 

It being on his arm wasn’t the surprise: both of his parents had manifested each other’s names on their arms. His father’s name had wrapped Iruka’s mother’s bicep like a bracelet, while his mother’s name had run down the top of his father’s right hand, visible to anyone who shook hands with him. Iruka had learned to read some of his alphabet from his parents’ names, tracing out letters with his fingertip and sometimes making his mother giggle. 

Iruka had always half-expected his bondword to appear on one of his arms, and sixteen was right on time as these things went. 

But the word that appeared on Iruka’s arm wasn’t a name, as he’d always expected. It was a dictionary word: Hound. 

Iruka rinsed his hair clean as fast as he could, scrubbed himself dry, and practically teleported back into his clothes, long-sleeved shirt and all. 

He’d seen the mask on the ANBU they’d run into by accident on this disaster of a mission, after all. 

* * *

“We’re lucky,” Iruka’s mother had always said, “a more visible name is a more visible bond.” 

It was just an old wives’ tale, Iruka knew, the idea that a name you couldn’t hide was a love you couldn’t prevent, but it featured in more than one romantic play. Lovers from bloodline families either got permission from their families because of the prominence of their bondwords, or died together, fingers twined together to blur their names into a single word printed on their skin.

Some people wore their bondwords proudly, showing off their match to the whole world. 

Iruka wore long sleeves. 

* * * 

Suzume-sensei met her husband again when his family moved back to Konoha after twenty years away in a border town. He was a civilian contractor, and they had played together as children, though neither of them had remembered the other’s name from their toddlerhood. Her wedding clothes were cut scandalously low in the back to reveal his name scrawled across her iliac crest. She looked delighted, and her husband smiled so brilliantly he almost gave the infamous Might Guy a run for his money. 

Iruka pasted a smile on his face and shook their hands, and then joined Mizuki at the bar to get completely, unprofessionally drunk. 

“Stupid dress,” Mizuki said. “She’s not skinny enough for something that revealing.” 

“Mm,” Iruka replied, long familiar with Mizuki’s preference for thin women. “How do you even see a name there?” Iruka wondered out loud. He knew it was a stupid question, but Suzume-sensei had been his confidante, his partner in bondwordlessness. Having her suddenly end up with a soulmate, and a civilian to boot, felt like a betrayal. 

“You’re such a lightweight,” Mizuki said. “Come on.” 

They staggered back to Iruka’s place, where the heat was broken again - and set on high. 

“Ugh,” Mizuki said, “it’s like you live in a sauna, doesn’t your landlord care?” 

Iruka shrugged, and pulled off his vest. It was sweltering, but he left his long sleeves on, walked over to open a window instead. Mizuki stripped his vest off, wrinkled his nose, and pulled off his overshirt as well before flopping down on Iruka’s couch. 

Iruka pulled out a couple of beers from the fridge, held one against the back of his neck. 

“Here,” he offered. Mizuki downed his in three gulps, got up, and got two more. 

“Prude,” Mizuki said some time later. He was shirtless, strands of hair plastered to his forehead. Iruka was still in long sleeves. “What am I going to do, tell Suzume you’ve got a bit of a belly?” 

“What?” Iruka blurted, staring at him. The beer in his hand was long warm, but it was still cooler than the still air in his living room. 

“You looked like you were at a fucking funeral today,” Mizuki said, waving a hand and almost knocking over several empty bottles. “You could have said something if you were that set on her. Not everyone is tied up in bondwords, you know.” 

Iruka gaped. 

“Well,” Mizuki said, “not everyone has one, you know? So what. It’s not that big a deal.” He shrugged, expansive and very, very drunk. 

“I don’t --” Iruka began. “You think I -- and Suzume-sensei --” He drained his beer. “It’s not like that,” he started.

“Sure,” Mizuki said. “Whatever you say. Just don’t get in a fight with her husband, he’ll mess you up.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Iruka said, sitting up straight. “It’s not like that.” 

“What, then,” Mizuki asked, “were you long-lost soulmates in not having bondwords?” 

The mockery in his tone was too much. 

“Fuck you,” Iruka said, and shoved his shirtsleeves up. He pushed his arm under Mizuki’s nose. “See?” 

Mizuki grabbed his arm, held it still, squinting. 

“Hound,” he read. He looked at Iruka. “ANBU.” He let go. 

“Yeah,” Mizuki said, “good luck getting anyone in ANBU to look at you twice. You should be walking around in short sleeves if you want half a chance.” 

Iruka pulled his sleeves down, already regretting it. 

“Besides,” Mizuki said, “seriously, what’s the death rate like these days?”

“What?” The war was going badly, Iruka knew, but surely not that badly. 

“Don’t get attached,” Mizuki advised. “If you even figure out who they are before they die, I mean.” He closed his eyes, and Iruka felt his stomach churn. “I mean --” Mizuki started. 

“Get out,” Iruka bit out. 

Wonder of wonders, Mizuki actually left, but his words hung in the air even after he had gone.

* * *

"I knew it was your mother," Iruka's father had said, "because when we shook hands, it buzzed up my whole arm."

Bondwords wouldn't appear until you'd met the person you were bonded to, sometimes not until you'd touched them: it depended on their chakra control, and yours, and a million other factors besides. Since Konoha's children played together, shinobi and civilian alike, before splitting off into the Academy and the district schools, this was rarely an impediment. The Uchiha's clannishness and separate district were rumored to be a way of preventing the appearance of inconvenient bonds, but that had become ancient history for Iruka's current class, a legend nearly as old as the founding of Konoha itself. 

* * *

It had been a long day teaching, and Iruka was half-tempted to leave the dishes to soak overnight, but he had to be at the Academy early so Naruto could finish cleaning the classroom from his last prank. Iruka sighed and rolled up his sleeves. Then he froze, hand out-stretched to turn on the hot water. 

The bondword on his arm was blurry at the edges, the characters losing some of their characteristic sharpness. Iruka had seen a lot of variation in bondwords, but they weren’t supposed to change. Not like this.

Good luck with that, Iruka heard Mizuki’s voice, you know what the death rate in ANBU is like. 

Iruka rubbed the word with his thumb, as if it might come off on his fingertips. Nothing changed. The word still looked like calligraphy that had been left out in the rain, running at the edges. 

Iruka mourned privately as the bondword became more and more illegible over time, but ANBU died young, and most of them never had bondwords at all. If he sometimes thought he saw characters emerging in the fog, well, they never resolved into something really legible, just shadows under the ever-blurrier “HOUND.” 

It took Orochimaru’s attack and the decimation of Orochimaru’s ranks for Iruka to put two and two together. 

"Can't come out tonight," a newly-minted tokubetsu jounin said to his friend as they were leaving. "Goddamn Copy Nin's too good to write our mission report, shoved it at me." He looked down at the scroll in his hand, a sloppy preliminary report in Hatake’s handwriting, which Iruka had already begun to loathe in his few short months on the desk. "Stuck up sonofabitch." 

"Hah," his friend said. “Bitch, more like.” He mimed a mask.

They exchanged a glance, and the tokubetsu jounin shuddered before dropping his eyes to the scroll in his hand.

"He's still an ass," the man muttered. Iruka would be inclined to agree, but his head was too busy whirling. 

“Hey,” a chuunin said a moment later, waving a hand before Iruka’s eyes. “Umino.” 

“Sorry,” Iruka said, and got through the rest of his shift on muscle memory and rote repetition. 

Bitch, Iruka heard over and over again in his memory, and saw the jounin make a mask gesture. HOUND.

* * *

"They tell us our name's meaning," Iruka's mother said once. "Our inner selves, so our loved ones can see them and know us better." 

Bondwords were always true names. More than one legend had a changeling child revealed by their lover's bondword, a daimyo's bastard child or prince in disguise taking up their patrimony with bondword as sufficient proof. You couldn't fake one: every child in Konoha had written a name in ink on themselves at some point. Iruka had seen Sasuke's name on more girls than even the most optimistic boy would be happy about. Some civilians got tattoos instead, but the difference was visible to anyone with even the slightest touch of chakra. 

* * *

It took weeks to square the aloof jounin, perennially late sensei and lazy reputation with the blurry word on Iruka's arm. The more he thought about it, the more Iruka wondered. Eventually, it was too much to bear.

All right, Iruka told himself. You can do this. He took a deep breath, shoved up his sleeves so his bondword was clearly visible, and knocked on Hatake Kakashi’s door.


End file.
